No worries!

Doing things is much more important than replying to messages. I'm glad you didn't let this distract you.

I am a bottleneck and I wonder if EA SF needs a proper proper organizer to take this to the next level. 

Have you tried talking to funders (or folks familar with how they generally think)? I would be surprised if there wasn't funding available to support a team working on EA/AIS fieldbuilding if the right folks were involved.

I agree that there's a division between creating a community with good vibes and running professional events. This feels like quite a logical division of labour. 

"In general, I think all 5 strands make sense: mass outreach, online community, conference, AIS fundamentals, advising. Overall, "more dakka" seems great. If Mox had more money, we could easily turn up the dial on making these things happen"

Has someone tried pitching ambitious SF fieldbuilding to funders? Maybe not Mox though given recent controversies...

I feel like these approaches are still more generic for general AIS/EA fieldbuilding, but the shape of fieldbuilding for SF might be particularly different, because a lot of the people you care about reaching are very busy, have high opportunity costs. They're Anthropic or OpenAI employees, or maybe city staffers and policy people

I agree that if you can directly reach these people, it is probably more valuable (though this is only something that people should attempt if they can operate at a very high level; Mox might be able to do this given how well Manifest was run; I'm unsure how much AI lab employees care about the whole Caroline Ellison thing.

There is a LOT of room for personal bias in that assessment

Indeed. However, I would say that if you don't trust your own judgement (or at least your ability to develop good judgement over time), then maybe you shouldn't be running an org?

I wouldn't assume that Trump's attacks will be an ongoing thing. Responding may simply draw more attacks. Honestly, I think we should just brush it off. Maybe his attention moves onto something else next week.

It's not actually clear that we actually should respond. There's a lot of aura in deciding that attacks are beneath you and you're not going to respond to them.

Why not publish a new edition with additional commentary? I think there would be demand.

A few thoughts:
a) "Rejected or never heard back at the first stage and left confused" - if someone clearly isn't good cultural fit, then identifying this at the first stage is the ideal outcome as it saves the time of both parties.
b) "Rejected at the final stage having wasted lots of time without useful feedback" - unfortunately, if someone is a bad cultural fit, then it's hard to provide feedback without coming off as rude. Additionally, it's hard to provide any feedback on this at all without making it easier for candidates to hide their lack of cultural fit. 
c) "Many of the “unicorns” fall into one of two buckets with very few of the people I’ve spoken to falling in the middle. Many also swap between buckets without consistency" - Honestly, I'd take wrapping between the buckets without consistency as a red flag rather than a sign that the selectors were wrong. After all, in this case they seem to have failed both the immediate gut check and the more considered reflection of people who wanted to be open minded and let them advance.
d) "It also seems like many orgs want ops people (even those on the hard ops side) to have excellent AIS knowledge and fluency, even though this is not required for the role" - I think there's a lot of benefits of having a unified organisational culture so you're all rowing in the same direction. If you hire someone who is only suited for a particular role, then you have less flexibilty in the future to promote them into other roles. You're also providing them with an implicit endorsement which may lead to them being hired into roles they'd be unsuited for in the future by other folks.
e) "A few hiring managers I’ve spoken to are very wary of hiring senior folks who haven’t come from EA/ rat circles citing individual bad experiences with such people. This feels pretty uncharitable given how many bad students there are compared to the few good students who get hired" - Is it charitable to dismiss the accounts of folks who wanted to be open minded and tried hiring such folks and then learned lessons from it? I'm not saying these hires can't work, just that the reasons for why they may not work are very subtle and I'd be much more enthuastic about your project if you were better able to steelman the opposing perspective (see also Chesterton's Fence).
f) "While it is true a bad senior hire can be more expensive than a bad junior hire, we can get far more information about the track record of senior people from their experience." - that doesn't really help if the issue is that the candidate is highly competent, but a poor cultural fit.
g) "Frustratingly, lots of these candidates do well/ are silver medalists in hiring rounds and are never passed on anywhere else" - If a candidate was almost but not quite good enough to land the role, you might want to pass them on. On the other hand, if a candidate is a poor culture fit, you're much less likely to want to pass them on.
h) "I would push these people to consider whether increased legibility of AI Safety due to recent warning shots and political salience could unlock much faster transitions that we aren’t capitalising on" - I expect that warning shots help because it reduces the epistemic distance between the AIS community and the rest of the world, but I'm unsure why you think political salience would help rather than hurt. I tend to agree with Eliezer that Politics is the Mindkiller.
i) "Most of these people have done several BlueDot courses" - I've also facilitated for BlueDot. These courses do a lot of things well, but we shouldn't be expecting these courses to be fixing the problem of cultural fit. Cultural fit is the kind of thing that is hard to address with an online format. I expect BlueDot's Context Week is much more likely to be the right format for this. I also agree that local hubs are a good way of supporting this (I'm trying to do what I can at the Sydney AI Safety Space).
i) Despite everything I've said, seeing how many rounds closed without a hire suggests that we desperately need more talent and so I really do hope your project goes well, even if I think the challenge is much harder than you anticipate. Feel free to reach out if I can assist in any way.

There's an old Facebook group, New EA hub search and planning, that might be worth reviving in light of the incresed amount of funding coming into the space.

Even with more availability of funding, many talented folks won't get funded or will only recieve small amounts. Establishing new hubs that provide an easier entry-way to being surrounded by community seems like potentially quite high value. After all, it takes a village to raise an EA and being surrounded by others is an accelerator to impact.

1. Sydney has an AI Safety Hub, but it's far from it's potential. Unfortunately, this isn't anyone's main focus right now.
2. I'd talk to Yanni who runs TARA. He's running ML bootcamps in a bunch of cities and he's planning to scale this further. The graduates of his program could form the seeds of a new hub.
3. I think this is a cool idea, esp. re: sharing of resources and I'd be excited to see if your free agent plan works. However, I'm honestly pretty skeptical of your city prioritisation and that dramatically reduces my estimation of the value of this project as far in my books. I expect this would also reduce the chance of the project being funded.

One worry, which only applies to certain classes of MCP, is that folks may try to take what they're doing already and reframe it as AIS, without checking whether the ToC makes sense, BC of the increasing status and funding associated with AIS.